4/5 stars
At times I liked this a lot – a neat companion to Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon as a novel about the birth of the computer age. It could equally work as a companion to Sebastian Mallaby’s non-fiction The Power Law, focused on the venture capitalists and somewhat unstable, potentially sociopathic tech bros who have built the modern tech industry into the morally suspect force that it is.
Effectively a montage rather than a narrative, with surprisingly little-known polymath genius John von Neumann and the various hugely influential ideas he had as its centre of gravity, it’s as wide-ranging as he was. This is the guy who co-created Game Theory (an approach many tech types seem to consciously adopt), helped develop not just the atomic bomb, but also the hydrogen bomb and concept of Mutually Assured Destruction – with its wonderfully appropriate acronym.
But he also came up with some initial concepts for artificial intelligence, notably the self-teaching, self-reproducing, self-improving Von Neumann machines that he envisioned spreading through the universe long after his (and humankind’s) death.
It’s this that the book is really building to throughout: Pretty much all modern AI systems are Von Neumann machines – at least, to an extent.
This makes this extremely timely and thought-provoking, despite being about someone who died 70 years ago.
How will these systems continue to evolve? Given von Neumann himself is, throughout, compared to the machines and systems he developed – his utterly alien way of thinking, his apparent disregard for his fellow humans, his neglect of his family, his apparent patronising contempt for people not as smart as he was – the suggestion that these alien intelligences are something to be wary and probably scared of starts coming through stronger and stronger.
This culminates in the final section, a detailed narrative of the significance and a blow by blow account of DeepMind’s 2016 victory over the world’s leading human Go player with their AlphaGo system.
Yet while an impressive achievement, as a whole the book didn’t quite work for me. The different voices talking about their relationships and experiences with von Neumann, done as if being interviewed, eventually all started to sound too similar. The opening and closing sections were thematically clearly linked, but the structure as a whole leaves the reader doing much of the work to connect the dots and get to the point the author’s making. A final coda to wrap it all up would, for me at least, have been appreciated.